The Cartographers’ Guild is a forum created by and for map makers and aficionados, a place where every aspect of cartography can be admired, examined, learned, and discussed. Our membership consists of professional designers and artists, hobbyists, and amateurs—all are welcome to join and participate in the quest for cartographic skill and knowledge.

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Hybrid View

To all the Cartographers, who are gamers!

I've been away from the forums for a while I was over seas for the summer, now I'm back. I've found a great game, that can also be used for mapping! Now, the game is called Minecraft. It's currently in Alpha development but it has a huge community with over 100 thousand copies sold already.

The game is about two obvious things: Mining and Crafting.
Essentially you mine blocks, and then use those blocks to either build structures or craft items (sword, axe, pickaxe, etc.). In single player there are mobs (or bad guys) that come out at night, ie. Zombies, Skeletons. This can be turned off if you use the Peaceful game setting.

You have five save slots (You can delete saves of course), in single player and every single time each world is generated randomly, so no two single player files will be the same.

Here is an image of a castle built in minecraft (Not mine, image taken from google):

Now, there is a program written by a community member that will render out your world, into a map layout.

Last night I started work on a castle and here are two renders of it from the Cartography program the community member has written.

As you can see, adding more and more detail will make the maps look much better.

I should note, that building large cities in single player will take you a long time, however is there is multiplayer servers! And you can collaborate with anyone to build vast cities!

Currently the game is 50% off while in alpha, but there is no telling when alpha will be over. The game has progressed fairly far already.

Is the background randomly generated and you get to build your man made stuff ?
Do the creatures at night destroy your castles or build their own forts etc ?
Does the system build anything or does someone have to be on the end of the internet building stuff on a server that your connected to in order for stuff to get built automatically (i.e. you dont do it) ?

100,000 copies sold ? How much is the app then ? and do you have a link to it for ease of clicky fingers.

1. When you start a new game save, a world will be generated at random. It's usually very big. There will be caves, waterfalls, and even lava. Everything is is random (after you make the first world, then everything is consistent). The whole level is generated, anything afterward like forts or roads or castles you build yourself. To do this you must mine, so say you dig one dirt block. Then you get one dirt block into your inventory that you can place anywhere.

2. There is one type of creature, that if it gets close to you, it will blow up and if it's near your fort it will get destroyed or at least part of it will. The creatures do not build any forts of there own, and they are only out at night. They catch fire when the sun comes up.

3. Not sure what you mean, but mulitplayer is the same as single player for the most part. The only difference is there isn't any creatures that will attack you, and most servers give you whatever, resource wise, so you can build what you want. Nothing is built automatically, everything is done by you, or someone else on the server.

4. The game currently costs 9.99 pounds, which is around 12 dollars US while it is the Alpha stage of development. After that, the price will double.

“When it’s over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? If so, the score does not matter. But if you find that you did your best you were capable of, you will find it to your liking.” -John Wooden

Wow, a 1.2 million bucks ! And it sounds like an awfully simple concept. I was asking about the auto generation because I am writing something along vaguely the same lines only this is a tool to make maps instead of play games in. All the people doing the building would be AI drones instead of people on the other end of the internet. I was wondering if someone had wrote something just like what I am trying to do because that seems to be the story of my life to date. I guess I will need to sink a lot more time and effort into mine and be nearly finished before someone posts that link to some pre-existing well known version.

Indeed it is. I though I should post the game here, because there is a lot of creative freedom in what people can build. From temples to ships (not working, but still great looking), to traps (I'm not great at making traps) but it is possible. And with servers, and collaboration you really can make some cool structures and cities.

The game is a first person game. I recommend watching some videos on Youtube.